Characters / So I'm a Spider, So What? — Kumoko

WARNING: This page contains MASSIVE unmarked spoilers which give away multiple plot twists. Read at your own risk!

Voiced by: Aoi Yūki (Anime, Japanese), Sumire Uesaka (PV & CM), Brianna Knickerbocker (English) ^{Foreign VAs}Romina Marroquín Payró (Latin American Spanish), Charlotte Hervieux (French), Manuela Bäcker (German), Pamella Rodrigues (Portuguese)

^{Click here} to see her Arachne form. (SPOILERS!)

"Kumoko"

Kumoko is the unofficial name of the protagonist, a girl who reincarnated as a spider inside a deep labyrinth. She finds that she actually takes rather well to the monster filled dungeon she lives inside and accepts the RPG world at face value without a second thought.

While she has a reclusive personality and can't speak human language, she's intelligent and inventive, but also incredibly careless and with some rather skewed morals.

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• Accidental Hero: While her intentions are good, she wasn't aware that killing suspecting people turned out to be thugs and slave owners. In her point of view, that's how she saw it. For the humans, they're slavers and thugs hired by elves.
• Achievements in Ignorance:
  • Justified considering the circumstances regarding her arrival into the new world, and especially compared to the other reincarnators. When you're reincarnated as a mook-level spider with initially no way to communicate with other humans, find yourself stranded in a immeasurably huge cave filled with increasingly dangerous monsters and only have the RPG-esque Skill System and a deliberately vague Jerkass God to directly tell you anything, this trope is inevitable. Aside from that, there's nothing or nobody around to tell her how anything is supposed to work and what is and isn't supposed to be possible, so she just tries everything she can. As a result she frequently ends up performing the "impossible."
  • Kumoko really doesn't understand how impressive the things she does are. She becomes incredibly adept with magic in a short period because while you seem to need a target for magical ability to rise, there's no reason you can't target yourself with very low powered magic and then just heal yourself afterward if you get hurt. Plus, your resistance to that kind of attack will rise at the same time. Before she's even two years old she's already mastered this to the point where this constant self attack and self healing is entirely unconscious, stunning the strongest mortal mage alive with its brilliance. Such a thing had never even occurred to him because it's so insane to target yourself with attacks.
  • Most people assume you either need to have the proper skill rank in magic to use a certain spell or at least an artifact enchanted to cast that spell, but Kumoko sees Araba casting magic and thinks 'Hm, well, I can probably do that on my own without the System helping out.' And she can, which horrifies Ronant the first time they 'meet' because that isn't supposed to be possible. She wonders if it's due to Magic Extremity, but a Q&A session clarifies that no, she really is just that good.
• Achilles' Heel: She can't see behind her, nor can she sense air currents back there. Since this is mostly how she perceives the world, she absolutely cannot detect enemies behind her: At one point, despite specifically looking out for the Elro wasps, she still gets stung repeatedly in the back because she simply can't tell where they are. She also half-seriously wonders if Taratects have a built in disadvantage to finjagaoths to mimic real-life biology where spiders are easy prey for wasps.
• Adaptational Heroism: As time passes in the web novel, Kumoko could at best be described as morally shady or too immature to grasp moral behavior. She engages in cannibalism with no fuss when she sees other spiders do it, slaughters humans and eats them and comes up with complex and extremely dangerous plans while deceiving well-intentioned people like Shun or Balto. In the light novel and manga, while she does eat a fellow Taratect, it was already dead and she was on the verge of starvation, she reacts less negatively to the reveals of Taboo and is more clearly motivated by a desire to get off the planet before it self destructs than to punish humans. Also, the slaughter of the subjugation team wasn't even fully intentional: She underestimated the power of her Evil Eyes of Grudge and the first few just dropped dead. No mention is made of eating the bodies and finding them to be yummy, though it's later acknowledged that she did eat them.
• Adaptational Wimp: She tends to struggle more during her fights in the light novel. For example, in the web novel there's a scene where she kills an eel just by looking at it after acquiring some new skills, curb stomps the fire drake rather than it being a close fight and beats Rend one on one with no assistance from Mother beforehand. The Arch Taratect actually puts up a decent fight and almost manages to recover and turn things around in the light novel when in the original there was nothing it could do the moment Kumoko started the fight. Araba also puts up an even better fight with Kumoko never at any point thinking she can actually win fairly.
• Adaptation Dye-Job:
  • In the web novel, Kumoko is born pitch black with red eyes. The manga version depicts her as pink, while the other Taratects are black. The light novel meanwhile varies between pink, brown, and gray (presumably because she can't actually see that well for quite awhile in the darkness of the labyrinth).
  • The anime shows her and the other Lesser Taratects with a white and black carapace, sometimes with red markings depending on her current form. She also has red eyes.
• Animalistic Abomination: D notes that Kumoko shouldn't have survived after evolving into a Zoa Ele, let alone an Ede Saine or Zana Horowa, due to the species' Rot-based attacks being intended to kill them. Kumoko's high resistance to Rot damage due to eating an Elro Gastruch renders her an anomaly, enabling her to eventually become an immortal arachnid monster that radiates an aura of terror, can regenerate from having her body completely destroyed, teleport, and kill people by looking at them — even indirectly. It's not for nothing that she gains the moniker of the Nightmare of the Labyrinth, and even fifteen years later is regarded as an unnatural entity that could eat or aid those who seek her out on a whim.
• Art Shift: In the anime, she looks completely like a giant monster spider from humans' point of view, but as soon as we switch to her point of view, she becomes a Funny Animal spider instead. This shift in art styles is used in her various scenes with humans to make the normally cute, silly Kumoko look considerably more threatening and play up her Mook Horror Show qualities... before shifting straight back to her regular Funny Animal style.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Kumoko eventually succeeds in becoming a god due to her ceaseless struggle for survival and power and a natural talent for energy absorption.
• Balloon Belly: Early on Kumoko notes that her body swells up whenever she eats a large meal, but after developing the Overeating and Satiation skills this goes away. Oddly enough, Overeating was supposed to make this swelling problem worse, but instead her stomach just seems to function as a bottomless pit instead. She never does figure that one out. The light novel addresses this one by noting that monsters do not feel the negative effects of Overeating.
• Berserk Button: Having her first home burned by adventurers traumatized Kumoko to the point that even after becoming basically immune to fire she'd kill anyone who tried to burn her stuff. Her reaction the next time someone tried was so extreme it even became a rule to never light the Taratect's web on fire.
• Beware the Silly Ones: Kumoko tends to come off as goofy and often had quirky habits. Nonetheless, she was also called "The Nightmare of the Labyrinth" because of how dangerous she can be.
• Big Eater: Kumoko refuses to let anything she's killed go uneaten no matter how gamey, poisonous, rubbery or simply disgusting it is. She also eats well beyond what is really necessary, eventually leading to first the Overeating and then Satiation skills. It's implied that this would normally lead to the Gluttony Ruler skill, but those are unique and Gluttony is already claimed by Ariel. Eventually, she starts overdoing it so much in terms of hunting that it begins to have an effect on the local monster population, which is one reason she moves out.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: From Zoa Ele onward, Kumoko's foremost set of legs become razor-sharp scythe-like blades.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality
  • Kumoko seems to only vaguely believe that murder is wrong, which functionally just means that she generally doesn't pick fights with anyone intelligent that hasn't messed with her first. If nobody bothers her, she's also perfectly happy to heal or help anyone that she runs across so long as they aren't rude to her. This behavior deeply worries the people who know of her because that is behavior far more intelligent than what a monster should be capable of, but also potentially really dangerous.
  • She much more strongly believes in the idea that food should never be wasted and will eat anything or anyone she kills. Gyurie at one point comes up to her when she's cleaning one of her kills, a puffer fish-like water drake. She removes the poisonous innards and eats the tasty meat, but then cannot help but continue on to eat the disgusting organs she intentionally set aside. She hates wasting food that much.
• Body Backup Drive: Kumoko can transfer her soul into eggs she laid in advance and possess the body, regaining her stats by growing back into an adult. She also uses this for the Queen Taratect she took over when Ariel killed it.
• Born as an Adult: Unlike most of the other reincarnations, Kumoko never had a period of time where she was dependent on others for her survival, as she was capable of looking after herself from the moment she hatched.
• Breath Weapon: After defeating the Fire Dragon Rend she gains the power of dragon breath. It's not very efficient so she pretty much never bothers, though she notes that since it matches her own elemental affinities it's a very nasty combination of dark and poison. After she assimilates some of Mother's stats and skills, her breath weapon's power increases to the point that it's able to counter the Queen Taratect's own and even blow off legs with a single shot. In the anime, her Dragon Breath becomes powerful enough to almost completely obliterate Mother's body with a single blast.
• Bowdlerise: Her healing of a Littlest Cancer Patient and his mother. In the light novel, she couldn't just heal the boy with healing magic, and had to resort to surgically removing the affected organs and growing new ones for him, and knocks out the mother so she wouldn't be worried. The anime made the healing magic much more powerful by not only curing the boy's cancer but also restoring the mother's failing organs and curing her fatigue, thereby removing the surgery outright. This does slightly downplay one minor plot point: Magic only curing injuries but not diseases was a feature, not a bug. D wanted skills to only be used for fighting, so having it be useful for general medical usage is counterproductive.
• Butt-Monkey: She tends to get herself way in over her head due to her own carelessness, even accidentally setting herself on fire occasionally through sheer absentmindedness.
• Cannibalism Superpower:
  • Kumoko sending her parallel selves to consume Mother's soul grants her a number of Mother's abilities once they return to her, and correspondingly weakens Mother's own abilities and stats to the point where Kumoko is able to more-or-less fight evenly with her.
  • How she achieves apotheosis is this, though it depends on the medium. In the Web Novel, this happens after finding an ancient abandoned MA energy harvesting facility and using knowledge from the Taboo skill to unite within her own body her magic and the MA energy within the facility's MA storage/power core and the cores of all the robot defences it had, which levels up her Divinity Skill to the max. It is a more Straight example in the Light Novels when she encounters and awakens the G-Fleet, infiltrates it, eats the G-Fleet's continent-destroying GMA Bomb and absorbing all of its MA energy when it explodes within her.
• Catchphrase: No way! (Nai wa! in the Japanese version.) Downplayed in the English translations, since the slang phrase isn't as easily recognizable as a catchphrase when translated.
• Chekhov's Skill: The "Rot Resistance" skill that Kumoko got from eating the Elroe Gastruch (Snailbug) is what allowed her to survive as a Zoe Ere and Ede Saine, allowing her to use her Rot based attacks without dying immediately, and ultimately allowing her to evolve into a Zana Horowa.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Kumoko is weird. She is prone to bizarre Imagine Spots while monologing when nobody is around to listen.
• Crazy-Prepared: When going up against Ariel, Kumoko has absolutely no hope for victory in a real fight. None whatsoever. She only survived the first "fight" thanks to having the Immortality skill when she was reduced to Ludicrous Gibs, and if Ariel had realized she had that at the time, Abyss Magic would have made that a non-issue. However, after surviving their first confrontation by switching bodies she goes to so much effort setting up dummies, safeguards, spare bodies and traps that even she can't think of a way that she could possibly be killed. Ariel can't even find her let alone defeat her like this. Eventually the two agree to a ceasefire and begin working together since they only came into conflict to a misunderstanding anyway.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Near the end of the Elro Labyrinth period, she hits a wall when using her normal methods of fighting: Most high level creatures are resistant to magic and very resistant to status effects and an increasing number can compete with her in speed. She starts shifting specializations as a result to focus on making her magic as powerful as possible while using melee with her claws as a secondary means of combat.
• Cute Monster Girl: She eventually does become an Arachne, gaining a partially human form in the process. The human top half is very beautiful, but because of her pure white skin she's also slightly creepy.
• Determinator: Early in her second life, she resolves to do whatever it takes to survive. She suppresses all her confusion and horror regarding her second birth in order to escape the initial bloodbath. Then she is willing to eat her sibling, which is so bitter she threw up the first bite because she was determined not to die of starvation.
  Komoko: I'll survive, just watch me!
• Deadly Gaze: She can kill with a look by either using a Rot or Grudge attack. They're both terrifying in different ways: A Rot attack disintegrates someone while a Grudge attack can make someone drop dead on the spot for no obvious reason. Eventually her stats are so high that even Evil Eye skills that aren't supposed to kill enemies can one-shot weak opponents.
• Death from Above: After unintentionally starting a war between Sariella and Ohts, Kumoko decides to help the Sariellan army and starts raining giant spheres of dark magic down on the Ohtsian army, riddling the battlefield with massive craters. Even she's taken aback by how devastatingly powerful her magic is.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Whatever virtues she has, a good sense of appropriate response is not really among them. Anything that has at any point been a threat to her has to die. Anything that's not a threat but still picks a fight has to die. Anyone that messes with the few people she cares about also have to die. At one point she kills tens of thousands of people because they defended themselves against perceived aggression even though they were of no threat to her, nor was the soldier who instigated it without thinking.
• Ditzy Genius: Kumoko is astonishingly brilliant but she's also a careless, smug little airhead with a poor attention span. She masters magic unassisted by the System through mere observation and has alarmingly fast growth as a full-fledged god but she's also capable of nearly drowning herself by tipping over when walking over water, sets herself on fire over and over again and totally forgets about some of her most powerful abilities for days or weeks on end.
• Diverging Evolutionary Phases: Invoked. Being reincarnated as a spider monster, Kumoko discovers that when she reaches a high enough level, she is given options on what kind of different types of spider monsters she can evolve into. She makes various intelligent choices (choosing smaller forms that emphasize speed and resourcefulness so that she can avoid being trapped underground) in the hopes that she will eventually become an Arachne to better communicate with humans.
• The Dreaded: Kumoko becomes feared as "The Nightmare of the Labyrinth", a monstrous spider of incredible strength that brought calamity everywhere it went. It is also because her constant grinding has made the native monsters whose species has been constantly farmed flee to the outside world just to get away from her, resulting in her encounters with the human adventuring parties. Even her children are fearfully referred to as the "Nightmare's Vestiges".
• Embarrassing Nickname: She finds 'The Nightmare of the Labyrinth' to be a ridiculous title, though no one else seems to realize that. Dustin actually thought she was telling him herself by doodling white spiders in the margin, much to her embarrassment.
• Enemy Without: The two Magic Minds are corrupted by eating Mother's soul, resulting in them becoming increasingly ruthless and eventually going AWOL, incarnating into their own bodies and going on a rampage before Kumoko puts a stop to them.
• Extreme Omnivore: At first she ate poisonous food only because there was nothing else. Eventually she reached the point where she wouldn't have to, but kept at it anyway because she hates wasting anything that can be loosely defined as food, which extends to incredibly poisonous or acidic meat, meat with the consistency of tires or rocks, centipedes that cause a paralysis effect, people that piss her off and, judging by the manga art, every scrap of food on her kills including the internal organs and eyes. She even comes to find quite a bit of it tasty in its own way, such as ants so acidic they'd melt a normal person's mouth or dragon meat so hard you would break your jaw just trying to chew it.
• Eye Color Change: Kumoko eventually turns pure white with red eyes, which carries over into her human form, Shiraori. Applying Evil or Heroic to her exclusively is a bit problematic, but she's definitely very dangerous.
• Feed It a Bomb: Her go-to strategy in the Middle Layer is making a big ball of poison, goading monsters into trying to eat her and then lobbing it down their throats. As she maximizes her venom's potency, this enables her to hunt monsters exponentially more powerful than herself, rapidly levelling up.
• Fragile Speedster: Thanks to receiving Kartikeya automatically, Kumoko's speed skill is more than 300 points greater than her other stats by the time Appraisal displays it. Her favored method of hunting exploits this, relying on fast stealth attacks and dodges. During every fight there's a constant awareness that one good hit on her will equal death. Even after her defenses catch up it doesn't matter much because as small as she is, getting hit by a dragon-sized enemy will still send her flying and leave her unable to respond.
• Freak Out: Twice.
  • Hitting Taboo 10 removes most of her desire to get along with humans and leaves her wanting to kill a whole bunch of them, in part out of self-interest and in part out of feeling they deserve it.
  • Second, when she hits apotheosis she seems at first to be mostly the same as always, but deep down has some serious neuroses are going on thanks to what she just learned and not being able to emotionally process her life up to this point. Overall she comes across as much more detached and less cheerful than before.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: She goes from being basically a Mook by the standards of this world, to being one of the most fearsome beings, even for the strongest adventurers.
• Giant Spider: Kumoko's newborn form is the size of a pig. Mother, the Queen Taratect, is essentially a kaiju.
• Glass Cannon: Early on Kumoko is weak enough that just one hit can put her near death but her Poison Fang is powerful enough to eliminate significantly more powerful monsters with just a few bites.
• Goal-Oriented Evolution: In the manga, Kumoko picks evolutionary forms to work her way towards becoming an Arachne, hoping that having a humanoid upper body will help her communicate and fit in with humans, and thus enable her to do things like buy sweets without causing a ruckus.
• A God I Am Not: Initially, when she was busy saving a town from bandits and elves, and healing the sick, she gained an unwanted reputation as a Divine Beast while she only did the latter to help a woman and her son with cancer. Then her reputation started to build up to the point that the town dedicated a shrine in her name, even though her action was out of kindness. Eventually, this trope would be averted in the most literal sense possible, despite not planning for it.
• Godhood Seeker: After her Taboo skill maxes out and she learns the truth of the world, Kumoko decides to level up until she can take out the Administrators and usurp their place in order to either stop the World's collapse or open a transdimensional portal to a new world.
• Had to Be Sharp: She ends up much, much stronger than any other reincarnator and much faster because, well, she was thrown into a giant cave filled with monsters that were all trying to kill her. In that kind of situation you either get strong or you die. And then the instincts learned by growing up in a death trap like that kick in so she's still frantically pursuing power even when she's no longer in mortal peril every time she wants to rest or get something to eat.
• Has a Type: Kumoko seems to have a thing for tough older men with good muscles and masculine faces, commenting once that a minor guide character would look great with a cigarette. She acknowledges that pretty boys like Julius are attractive enough in their own way, but isn't really interested in them.
• Healing Factor: She eventually gains the ability to automatically recover from injuries due to acquiring proficiency by healing when leveling. The most notable use of this is actually just to help her negate the environmental damage taken in the middle layer, where it's so hot that she's in constant pain and catches on fire several times. It also proves critical to make up for the weaknesses of the Immortality skill, which doesn't have the useful side benefits you would normally expect. Her powerful regenerative ability alongside her mastery of Magic, likely Space Magic, is what identifies her to both Dustin and Potimas as The Dreaded Nightmare of the Labyrinth in the light novels.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: She knows better than anyone that you can't earn a Sin or Virtue skill without your personality already being seriously bent in that direction, but when she earns Charity she considers it unearned and more like she cheated the System to get it. She doesn't seem to want to admit that she likes helping people in trouble and does so quite consistently.
• Hikikomori:
  • She tries not to build major nests too often as she worries about turning into a hikki that never leaves the nest and just eats the monsters that wander into it. She also wonders at one point if she's a hikki due to have spent most of her life in the labyrinth without ever seeing the outside world.
  • Later in the story it's shown that she can't really converse with others properly. The only reason she doesn't hide away from people is partially because there's no yummy food away from human society and partially because she can't since the world is in grave danger and someone needs to fix it.
• How Do I Shot Web?:
  • At the start Kumoko didn't know that she did it unconsciously, leaving a trail of loose thread wherever she walked. She felt embarrassed about it and at one point caught fire due to forgetting it. Later on after evolving into an Arachne her new upper body flailed about while moving until she figured out how to brace it.
  • Kumoko learns various kinds of magic before she learns the skills that actually let you use magic. As a result she tries in vain to just cast random stuff to no avail.
• Hypocritical Humor: Kumoko often criticizes people for doing the exact same things she does with greater or less amounts of self awareness. Like she gets mad when crossing the middle layer of the Elro labyrinth since nothing is willing to come out and fight face to face even as she pretends she'd never rely on webs or ambush tactics herself no sir. She also calls Ronant an idiot for casting offensive magic on himself completely unaware that he's merely copying what he sees her doing entirely unconsciously.
• In Love with Your Carnage: In the anime, while Kumoko watches Araba butcher an Elroe Baraggish, she sports a Luminous Blush and thinks to herself that the Earth Dragon's raw power and capacity for bloodshed are beautiful.
• Instant Expert: Kumoko masters new abilities as an astonishing rate. Pride and the fragment of D's soul inside her play a part, as do skills like Magic Extremity, but in the end it's really mostly down to her. With Magic Extremity, for example, she gains instant access to the perfect way to assemble and use high powered magic, but before long she's mastered magic to the extent that she doesn't really need it anymore anyway. She also takes to being a god extremely quickly and, much to her relief, is already better at space magic than Gyurie.
• It Can Think: From the perspective of humans, she's a powerful giant spider with incredible magical prowess that can end someone if she needs to, but will heal humans when asked and give her food as thanks.
• Jagged Mouth: In the manga, Kumoko is drawn with a serrated outline for a mouth. A brief closeup of her face when she's enraged in Chapter 56.2 reveals this is just Stylized for the Viewer, and her spider head's actual appearance is quite nightmarish.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: While she doesn't mind disadvantageous fights, whenever she feels she has no chance to win she flees without a second thought. She admits that sometimes people beat the odds and achieve these impossible victories, but she has no intention of trying for one of those one-in-a-million fluke victories.
• Kung-Fu Wizard: Due to her encounter with Potimas, Kumoko learns physical combat & Scythemanship and learned not to rely too much on System magic.
• Large Ham: When her isn't anxiety is holding her back, Kumoko gets very enthusiastic when she starts talking.
• Lemony Narrator:
  • Kumoko constantly narrates as though she was talking to someone else, including defending her behavior from perceived attacks. She almost certainly isn't, though, because she's, well, speaking a little too fluidly for that: Whenever she has to hold an actual conversation she can barely speak.
  • Her normal thought process is just as strange, such as immediately jumping to the conclusion that she's in a coma and having a panic attack when she seemingly can't move and then comparing rushing through a crowd of giant spiders to fighting grandmothers at the supermarket during a bargain.
• Likes Older Men: She acknowledges that bishies are handsome enough in their own way, but seems to prefer fit manly men from roughly the mid 30s to their mid 50s.
• Living Is More than Surviving: Kumoko originally had no reason to live beyond surviving. After the traumatic burning of her first home she realized how empty her life was. She focused on becoming strong enough so that she would never need to run again and could take pride in herself. That doesn't mean she still won't run if she is outmatched, however, as she finds the idea of standing with pride in the face of certain death as alien.
  Kumoko: There was a time once when I was desperate just to stay alive, and didn’t even have the luxury to have pride. However, a life without pride, is empty.
• Mind Hive: Using Parallel Will Kumoko is able to develop additional personalities within her body, each of which is in charge of a different task. At first she uses these to manage the information she has coming in, fight with the body and have some personalities use magic, but eventually uses them to attack the Queen Taratects and Ariel while otherwise keeping their usage entirely subconscious. This goes wrong when some of those personalities start acting out on their own.
• Monster Progenitor: She creates the Horo Neia, aka Nightmare's Vestiges, when playing around with a new skill. She didn't really mean to do it, but as a result of experimenting with the Egg-Laying skill inherited by eating Mother they hatched out and began obeying her. They're like Taratects but, well, better. They have pack hunting abilities, magic, telepathy and incredible stats. They keep to themselves unless attacked, however.
• Monstrous Cannibalism: She kills and eats one of her siblings after it attacks her. In the manga it had already been killed by adventurers and she was starving to death. She also takes to roasting the Greater and Arch Taratacts that Mother sends to kill her in the middle layer's magma, then eating them. She even considered eating her own children but ultimately decided to just let them gather food for her instead.
• Monstrous Mandibles: Scenes from the human characters' perspective show that the Jagged Mouth-style protrusions on the corners of Kumoko's upper jaw in the scenes from her perspective are actually chelicerae, and that she — like other Taratects — also has a mouth full of fangs.
• Mood-Swinger: Kumoko can't seem to maintain any one particular mood for long. At one point, she goes from helping some humans fight off a snake to wanting to kill all humans, followed by a rampage that gets interrupted with her randomly setting up what amounts to a sacred healing shrine for a town after saving a noblewoman from bandits on an impulse.
• Multiple Head Case: As an Arachne, she has two heads, each with it's own independent field of vision. They also have their own brain, which appears to work with tandem with each other, allowing Kumoko to continue fighting even if one of her heads are blown to bits.
• Munchkin:
  • Whenever Kumoko gets the chance to spend skill points, she always goes for the oddball abilities that seem likely to have high payoffs later or really ominous abilities like Ruler of Pride and doing her best to ignore the demerits. She also spends pretty much all her non hunting time slowly grinding up all her abilities even when they seem useless so she has more options available.
  • Whenever she has a choice to evolve, there's typically at least two choices and one of them is weaker for now but probably has a better payoff later. For example, a small lesser Taratect can become a Small Taratect or a Lesser Taratect. The latter is probably stronger, but might be unable to advance into stronger forms and carries another disadvantage of increasing in size, which hurts her evasion and limits where she can go. Eventually, she unlocks a special super ninja spider evolution explicitly because she has far greater abilities than a spider her level would normally have access to and because she decided to munchkin it up and stay small as long as possible: Zana Horowas are small sized creatures and evolutions only stay the same size or increase, meaning if she'd gone for an adult species she'd have screwed herself over.
• Nightmare Fuel: An in-universe example. In the eyes of humans, she is a large intelligent white Taratect spider with so many skills that even the most experienced adventurer shit their pants in terror at the sight of her. No one wants to pick a fight with her (except those who are even scarier than she is). However, Keren County is the only town that manages to be on her good side, and the humans there grew comfortable at her presence when she starts healing their citizens, despite her own social anxiety.
• Noble Demon: At her lowest emotional point she actively wants to go on a rampage and kill a lot of people, but can't bring herself to attack innocent people who have done her no harm. She tries to bait a city into attacking her nest but since she saved the city lord's wife and daughter there are standing orders not to pick a fight. One thing leads to another and little miss 'I want to kill all humans!' ends up running the equivalent of a free clinic. After she accidentally starts a war by killing a noble who'd been rude to her, she reluctantly decides to help out given it was her fault in the first place.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: The instant she leaves the labyrinth she is this. Her first act was the utter destruction of the fortress meant to contain the beasts of the labyrinth, entirely by accident.
• No Name Given: The protagonist is referred to by no in-story name; Even the nickname Kumoko^note literally just "spider" with a feminine name ending stuck on in Japanese is just a reference to her desire to become "Magical Girl Kumoko". This is used at first in the novel to trick the reader into thinking she may be Negishi Shouko, the girl that eventually became Sophia. Neither has their name given and the way Kumoko describes her past life seems to match up to the ugly, unhealthy girl in class that no one likes. Which then turns out to be a means of making the even bigger Red Herring of Wakaba Hiiro less obvious: Kumoko never had a name until she was named Shiraori by "D", as she was a house spider in the class rather than any of the humans.
• Not Worth Killing: It's first implied and later confirmed that the earth dragons Kumoko sees don't fail to kill her, they simply don't bother attacking further after getting rid of her annoying webs.
• One-Man Army: Even before she escapes the Elro Labyrinth, Kumoko's Level Grinding gradually makes her strong enough to take on literal hordes of dangerous monsters by herself, starting with the monkey-like Anogratch horde (albeit with a needed strategy and an extremely close call). She's also shown capable of handling big monsters that could also qualify as a One-Man Army themselves, such as the fire and earth dragons. By the time she does escape, Kumoko is so powerful that she can effortlessly slaughter large groups of humans when just a few months prior a small group of adventurers could've easily killed her. When she joins the War in Sariella — which she unwittingly started by killing a diplomat from Ohts — on behalf of Keren County, she devastates Ohts' army with a barrage of Black Bullets.
• Otaku: She's an obvious huge fan of anime and RPGs, spouting constant references.
• Parental Abandonment: By her own admission, she leaves her own children by themselves after they hatch, but not before leaving them something to eat. This is a huge improvement over how Mother would make her siblings resort to cannibalism and eating the weaker ones.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Thanks to her avoiding taking the evolutions that increase her size, she becomes incredibly powerful for someone who is only the size of a dog.
• Poisonous Person: Her trump cards early on are her spider venom and threads, which allow her to survive in the Elro Labyrinth despite being horribly outclassed. The meat of Taratects is also poisonous, which is the only reason they can survive: They're rather unappetizing to the other monsters. Much to her annoyance, poison magic doesn't exist outside the System, so when she becomes Shiraori she loses one of her greatest strengths.
• The Pollyanna: She has a very fundamental assumption that everything will work out in the end and everything will be just fiiiine, you'll see! Ariel feels this attitude infecting her own normal personality and can't even panic thanks to the weird feeling of 'it'll all be okay!' This attitude seems to largely fade away after turning into a god, which makes her more aware of what she truly is and what her future probably holds for her.
• Razor Floss: Kumoko can give the "Slashing" attribute to her threads to cut through all sorts of things. However, she seems to find just normal sticky thread more generally valuable and never really bothers with it again against any opponent important enough to be mentioned.
• Reincarnated as a Non-Humanoid: She has memories of being a high school girl in her previous life, but she was reborn as a spider Mook in the lowest stratum of a deadly labyrinth. She finds it incredibly unfair that almost all of her former classmates were reborn as humans or at least a humanoid race. Although it turns out that while she did reincarnate, she was never a human girl to start with; she was a simple house spider that the "high school girl" (who is actually a goddess) she thinks she is put a copy of memories into for her own entertainment and to screw with some of her fellow gods.
• Residual Self-Image: As the anime confirms, she only looks like a Funny Animal cartoon spider through her own pop culture poisoned brain. To humans, she looks much more like a giant arachnid without any "human" qualities, just like how she sees all the other Taratects.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Kumoko's manga and light novel appearance leans more towards a Funny Animal cartoon spider than a spider abomination, especially notable when compared to the art of the other monsters. It's not how she actually looks of course, but even then many of her evolutions look closer to a furry plush toy than other monsters.
• Scenery Censor: In the manga, when she evolves into an Arachne she's initially naked, with her humanoid upper body fusing into her lower body just below her pelvis, and although she's covered by chitin from the waist down there's a few suggestive grooves in her exoskeleton. While she quickly weaves a top to cover her chest, she leaves the equivalent to her hips bare, resulting in text boxes and her spider head's ear-like projections being used to hide her nether regions.
• Self-Made Man: Shun was born as a prince, given tutors, books to read, lists of skills and all the wealth and privilege he could ever need. Kumoko, in contrast, was born as a monster with no resources at all and had to figure out everything she needed to survive by herself. Within a few months, she's fighting dragons. Give her a few months more and she's a god. While D did give her a few little bonuses, she herself notes that Kumoko mostly didn't actually need them once she got going.
• Shaking the Rump: When she's excited and happy, Kumoko will sometimes celebrate by invoking this through shaking her abdomen. The anime's second opening includes a scene of her and her Parallel Minds effectively twerking, only for Magic Mind #2 to comically fall over.
• Sinister Scythe: After evolving, her front spider legs becomes a set of scythes. After evolving into Arachne, her weapon is an actual scythe, crafted from her own scythe legs. Since the scythe is technically a part of her, it actually gains additional abilities due to its connection to her own soul.
• Skilled, but Naive: In the light novel, she's at more of a disadvantage against Araba because he's an experienced fighter with centuries of experience while she's a six month old spider getting by on overpowered skills.
• Spanner in the Works
  • She derails the plans of Demon King Ariel to gather more fighting forces by doing exactly what she is instructed to do via Kin Domination: Become as strong as possible as quickly as possible, a command she didn't even realize she was following. The trouble is that while Kin Domination compels obedience from Taratect descendants, it's only Taratects. So when Kumoko becomes a Zoa Ele instead as well as gaining Heresy Nullification, she's suddenly a rogue agent that is skyrocketing in power and hostile towards the beings she correctly perceives as attempting to control her. This ends up costing Ariel one Queen Taratect, several Archs and a fair number of other less powerful minions. In the light novel, manga, and anime almost the entire army inside the Elro Labyrinth is destroyed, including a number of Puppet Taratects that are implicitly nearly as rare as the Queens.
  • Because a rogue spider monster popped out of the labyrinth and set up shop next to a mid sized city, Dustin's plans to marginalize and eliminate the Goddess religion were partially derailed. He still ended up achieving his goal, but now had a much bigger headache to worry about.
• Split-Personality Team: When Kumoko's Parallel Thought skill reaches level 10, it evolves into Parallel Mind — granting her a second — and eventually third and fourth — consciousness. Kumoko takes advantage of this by delegating different tasks to each consciousness: Body Mind focuses on maneuvering her body, Information Mind focuses on analyzing information, and the two Magic Minds focus on casting spells. During her confrontation with Mother, Kumoko sends Body Mind and the two Magic Minds to devour her soul, with Body Mind going on to attempt (and fail) to do the same to Ariel, though Body Mind is only able to influence Ariel's personality. However, friction starts to develop between the consciousnesses as the two Magic Minds start displaying a level of ruthlessness that Information Mind — Kumoko's original consciousness — is uncomfortable with, eventually resulting in the Parallel Minds going crazy and building a spider army using Kumoko's Egg-Laying skill, which ultimately forces Kumoko to kill and reclaim them.
• Stylized for the Viewer: The art style for the manga, light novel, and anime make her look cute and goofy with very exaggerated human and cartoonish body language. However, the instant other people see her it's clear that this is not at all what she actually looks like. Rather than a cute pink goof, her real appearance is a pitch black giant monster spider with a skull on her back and an aura of fear strong enough to make all but the strongest monsters run in terror. In the light novel and anime she's white instead of black, but still looks just as monstrous as the other spiders, including very creepy body language made all the creepier by her unusual mannerisms.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: It's hard to pick up at first since the majority of the narrative is Kumoko's inner dialogue, but in-universe she comes across as such. For most it's generally difficult to get past her seemingly stoic exterior, but then there's a shortcut...
• Supernatural Fear Inducer: After killing the fire dragon Rend, she gains a skill that causes her to passively radiate an aura of terror, scaring away monsters weaker than herself. To her chagrin, this skill can't be deactivated, making hunting more difficult.
• Sweet Tooth: She will eat anything she comes across, but she does prefer to eat normal things. She even sets up a healing shrine because people offer her fruit and pastries.
• To Serve Man: While Kumoko initially expresses distaste towards eating humans due to having been a former human herself, her dislike of wasting food leads to her usually eating any humans she kills — though at least they usually try picking fights with her first. Apart from bandits, they tend to be pretty tasty.
• Too Dumb to Live: Despite being a genius, she's also capable of incredible life-threatening stupidity. The most obvious of which is the time she gets so distracted thinking about the Wisdom skill and Administrators that she fails to notice that she just caught on fire and proceeds to not only almost burn to death (only being saved by a skill that substitutes MP for HP) but also to try putting it out with paralytic poison.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • She starts off as a Small Lesser Taratect, but eventually evolves into a Small Taratect, then a Small Poison Taratect, a Zoa Ele, an Ede Saine, a Zana Horowa and finally an Arachne. While these are all technically upgrades, the most significant two are becoming a Zoa Ele for the massively improved direct combat ability and Zana Horowa for the immortality skill. She actually notes that becoming an Arachne didn't really have much of an effect at all because any benefits to the race were just a drop in the bucket compared to what she already had.
  • When she acquires Pride and Wisdom, her abilities improve exponentially. Pride vastly increases the rate at which she learns new skills while Wisdom makes her a magic expert overnight.
  • After becoming a Zana Horowa but before becoming an Arachne she eats Mother's soul and gains all of her stats and skills.
  • Finally, she devours some MA Energy from a semiactive facility, gaining the last level of Divine Area Expansion she needs to become a god.
• Truly Single Parent: After eating Mother and gaining her Egg-Laying and Kin Control skills, Kumoko can lay eggs that grow into beings that are presumably clones of hers, called Horo Neia. They turn out to be much smarter than Taratects, though they're similarly weak-willed unless mom ignores them for too long and they grow their own identities. The Vestiges, said abandoned kids, appear to adore Kumoko and are smart enough to speak to people and appear to avoid conflict with humans unless provoked. She doesn't actually understand them, though. They're also each as powerful as a low to mid-ranked dragon but loaded up with nasty abilities.
• Tsundere: The first reincarnator she runs across is Sophia, but since she has no explicit obligations to the baby vampire she's reluctant to get involved and tries coming up with excuses to justify helping out. When she fails to come up with any she grudgingly does so anyway.
• Two Aliases, One Character: Kumoko is, or rather will become, Shiraori, the antagonist of Shun’s story. The first part of the main plot is actually set over a decade before Shun's side story even starts.
• Unreliable Narrator: Kumoko doesn't lie to the reader, but when she learns something she often doesn't bother to mention it, which can lead to a strange story where her actions appear to make little sense. She also misunderstands a lot of what's going on and states as fact the motives and actions of others when she's actually just guessing with unreliable accuracy.
• Unwanted False Faith: She didn't intend to be worshiped by the people of Keren Country, but after a series of misunderstandings she puts up with it as long as they keep bringing her sweets. And as it turns out, while she wasn't aware of it at the time, they weren't completely wrong to identify her as a Divine Beast; they thought she was one because they associated her with the Divine Beast spider that accompanied the Goddess in legends... who, as it turns out was her technical grandmother: Demon King Ariel.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Kumoko unwittingly kickstarts the events that lead to the destruction of both Wrath and Sophia's hometowns, resulting in their crappy childhoods. Sophia knows and accepts it wasn't really her fault, but Wrath is probably still in the dark.
  • After a team of adventurers including Buirimus and Ronaldt raze her nest, Kumoko slaughters all but a handful of them in a fit of rage. The blame for this incident falls on Buirimus, who is reassigned to the Mystic Mountains as punishment. While there, he came across Wrath's village and had them slaughtered, keeping Wrath as a slave due to his unique abilities.
  • While acting as a Divine Beast on the outskirts of Keren County in Sariella, Kumoko unwittingly starts a war by killing a diplomat from the country of Ohts after he insults her and tries to have her captured. While she decides to intervene on Sariella's behalf, Ariel attacks and eventually kills her with Abyss Magic — forcing her to transfer her soul to a new body — and by the time she returns to Keren County it has been razed by elvish insurgents sent by Potimas to capture Sophia.
• Uplifted Animal: Kumoko actually used to be a tiny spider inside of the classroom and has a correspondingly weak soul, even if it's shockingly talented. "D" grafting a tiny fragment of her own soul to the spider's gave it human consciousness, memories of a teenaged girl, and made it think it used to be one of the other students.
• Victory by Endurance: She's as patient as you'd expect a spider to be. Both against Araba and Ariel she constructs strategies based not around defeating them in combat but simply wearing them down in one form or another. For Araba, she uses Sloth to increase his stamina expenditures until the poor bastard collapses from exhaustion and starvation while with Ariel even this wouldn't work, so she sets up defensive strategies to make herself unkillable, giving her time to either devour Ariel or, failing that, force her to the negotiating table. Best of all, it works.
• Weak, but Skilled: Kumoko starts as a weak Small Lesser Taratect, possibly the weakest monster in the entire Elro labyrinth. However, with traps, speed and evasion focus, a brutal pragmatist streak, nasty poisons and other ever growing abilities, she rather quickly ends up one of the most dangerous creatures in the area.
• Weaksauce Weakness:
  • She can't swim. Or rather, she can't even submerge herself because she's too buoyant. That's not so bad. However, as an Arachne, her center of gravity shifts way forward and she ends up capsizing immediately when she tries walking on water again, nearly causing her to drown while her legs flailed helplessly above her.
  • In the Light Novel and manga she actually ends up buying the Swim skill as part of a strategy to drown Ariel's Puppet Taratects. This still leaves her a pretty terrible swimmer, but at least she can submerge herself and avoid drowning by using Space Magic as a makeshift diving tank.
• Wild Card: When she leaves the Labyrinth, she destroys a fort and slaughters some soldiers, then sets up shop next to a random village and kills as many of the local bandits as she can while running a free healing shrine. When a war starts up due to her killing a noble who was rude to her, she ends up nearly destroying both sides because even though she had intended to help just one, the other one saw a scary monster and attacked. And since she always retaliates when attacked, both sides get decimated. Notably, she has great affinity for many of the Ruler titles including being able to buy Pride with a mere 100 skill points and earning Wisdom and Charity with her actions.
• Willfully Weak: Several times after using a powerful skill, she decides not to use it in later fights. For example, after the fight with Rend, she decides Abyss Magic is too dangerous inside a closed space and before going to fight Araba, she seals off her Parallel Minds skill since she's using this skill to attack the Queen Taratect. Were she to have used these skills, she might have been able to beat him in a direct fight.
• You Don't Look Like You: The manga's depictions of Kumoko's various forms differ drastically from the light novel and anime's, with all her forms sporting Blank White Eyes, Jagged Mouth and no difference between how she sees herself and how others see her.

Parallel Minds

The Four minds — Body Brain, Intel Brain AKA original Kumoko, Magic Brain #1, and Magic Brain #2 — that once occupied Kumoko's mind. All Four have specific tasks that helps the main body on how to deal with enemies and defeat them.

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• Butt-Monkey: Magic Brain #2 emerges during a fight, tries to introduce herself in the same hammy way that all the "Kumokos" did, but gets told to shut up by the rest of them as they're busy. She is pretty peeved about it later when they actually need her help. The anime's second opening portrays her as particularly klutzy as well.
• A Day in the Limelight: A manga dedicated to them called So I'm A Spider, So What!? The Daily Lives of the Kumoko Sisters will focus primarily on them.
• Enemy Without: For a while, nine Parallel Minds — including the two Magic Brains — that Kumoko shunts into offshoots using the Egg-Laying skill become corrupted due to consuming Mother's soul — displaying a level of ruthlessness and bloodlust that disquiets Information Brain — Kumoko's original self. They lead the Horo Neia on a rampage until Kumoko kills them and puts them in their place.
• Excuse Me While I Multitask: Their entire purpose is to allow Kumoko to perform various complex functions at the same time, such as casting spells, dodging attacks, strategizing or analyzing information at the same time.
• Incoming Ham: All of them are just as hammy and over-the-top as Kumoko, although Magic Brain #2 tries to introduce herself this way at a very bad time, and is promptly told to shut up by the others.
• Literal Split Personality: Kumoko sends the two Magic Brains and Body Brain to start eating the Queen Taratect known as Mother from the inside, with Body Brain attempting to do the same to Ariel and eventually integrating herself into Ariel's soul. Kumoko incarnates nine of them, including the two Magic Brains, using her Egg-Laying skill, but — having been corrupted by consuming Mother's soul — they go awry and lead an army of Horo Neia to attack Keren County. Upon learning what they've been up to, Kumoko hunts them down, executes them, and re-absorbs their consciousnesses into herself.
• Living Weapon: After turning one of her Arachne scythe claws into an actual scythe weapon, the missing Parallel Mind slot once held by Body Brain gets filled in by a new Mind that inhabits the scythe, granting it various abilities.
• Mental Fusion: Body Brain goes into Ariel's mind and begins altering her personality. She is also responsible for Ariel making a truce with Kumoko in her Arachne form.
• Out of Focus: Although there are meant to be 11 in total (10 copies, plus the original for a total of 11 personas) by the time Kumoko levels the skill to Lvl.10, only the first four minds are given any attention or personalities in the various media. The LN does mention that there are 10 Mind copies, but that they are relegated to supporting the Magic Minds, and that's literally all we are ever told of them.

Wakaba Hiiro

Kumoko has memories of being a Japanese girl named Wakaba Hiiro in her past life. Said memories mostly consist of her being alone, both at school and at home.

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• Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: Wakaba was an extremely beautiful girl with long black hair, but also never interacted with her class or anyone at the school. Despite this, she became immensely popular because people just ascribed to her whatever personality traits they thought she should have.
• Bully Magnet: She was bullied by her class' Alpha Bitch, Shinohara Mirei, who was jealous of her good looks and annoyed by her antisocial attitude.
• Gamer Chick: She spent most of her free time playing video games.
• God in Human Form: The girl known as "Wakaba Hiiro" didn't really exist. She was a false identity created by D to escape her responsibilities as a god and enjoy a life on Earth as a high school girl. After the explosion that killed the whole class, D placed her memories as Wakaba in the soul of a spider and said spider came to believe she was Wakaba.
• Hiding Behind Your Bangs: In the anime, Wakaba's eyes are covered by her long bangs whenever she appears in flashbacks. This represents her antisocial personality.
• Indifferent Beauty: Wakaba was known to be incredibly attractive and was a campus crush, which earned her resentment from other women, especially Shinohara Mirei. Wakaba didn't seem to mind this and stayed a complete social recluse.
• Minor Living Alone: Her family had fallen apart, so she already lived by herself in high school. Although, the truth is she never had relatives to begin with.
• No Social Skills: Wakaba was bad at socializing. In class or even in the online games she played, she wouldn't communicate with anyone.
• The Quiet One: She only spoke the bare minimum required to partake in lessons.

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